skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would it make sense to allow running a vulnerable version of a plugin with just a click?

Perhaps with a hidden preference, for people who absolutely need an old version (to run some internal business app that fails with new versions, for instance), but by default?
Yes, a bit like Java itself, I see it as trending towards being an "Aircraft Supercarrier Battle Fleet" of functionality. (See also: the Hadoop ecosystem.)

But, it's free, powerful, and supported by a giant community... so once you get the hang of picking and choosing the parts you need, ignoring the rest until needed, you can get impressive results with minimal effort.
The best GitHub client is actually made of plastic
I use a dummy field on one site - called something like "Last Name" - the contents of which are hidden and must not be changed. The field contents are clear they must not be changed - "Do not alter this field!" - so that it still works for a wanted user if CSS has been tampered with.

No spam yet. But it's quite a small site, probably this is over only about 6Million hits.

For all I know it's just because it's a hand-coded site. Trying this on a WP site is on my todo list.
Thanks for mentioning Gatto. I think I already bought one of his books, but haven't read it yet. I am very scared of the time when my kid will have to go to school, because I personally hated it. It sounds as if I agree with a lot of Gatto's points. Not sure how to avoid it, though :-(

My best hope atm is to find some techniques to enable my kid to master school with minimum effort, trying to maximize non-school-dominated time. I don't think Homeschooling is possible in my country (Germany).

I imagine to turn it into a kind of game. For example there are memory competitions, and people don't seem to mind memorizing useless things to win those competitions. So perhaps if it can become a game to master the school nonsense in as little time as possible, there doesn't have to be so much suffering from the wastefulness of it all. Some useful skills could still be harvested from going through school that way (memory techniques, presentation skills and what not).

I can relate to a general lack of enthusiasm :-(

As for intellectually stimulating, I don't know. I must admit I am sometimes scared about playing with my kid (2 years old), because I fear not having any good ideas. Luckily he usually comes up with stuff himself, and somehow after a while things tend to happen, random ideas take on a life on their own. Maybe a bit like improvising music - after a while suddenly things start to "jell".

I suppose as a kindergardener you have a repertoire of so many standard games that you hardly have to improvise. But maybe that is a potential to escape the drudgery? In theory, couldn't you play out arbitrary scenarios, whatever you fancy? Like writing a new book? You could invent new games every day... Or at least role playing games.

Not that I know much about kindergardening... And I don't even play enough with my kid, hope to improve on that... Atm I sometimes read HN when I could be playing with him, which is ridiculous.
Here's the actual sorts used in the paper:

Insertion: https://github.com/pbiggar/sorting-branches-caching/blob/mas...

Bubble: https://github.com/pbiggar/sorting-branches-caching/blob/mas...

Insertion sort is significantly faster (esp in branch prediction, they have similar cache locality, insertion sort has few comparisons and fewer moves and fewer overall instructions), is almost the same to implement, and is actually the fastest possible way to sort arrays of size 4 (and probably true up to about 30). So it's actually useful to know insertion sort, whereas bubblesort is actually useless.
This is a single piece of awesomeness :)
More Retweets Lead to More Twitter Followers, Right?
I'd argue that at face value law is a lot more social. Don't know about accounting - maybe it is not so demanding on the brain - more routine work and less hard thinking? I don't say that to imply women are less good at thinking, just that having to think in general might be unpleasant (the book "Thinking slow and fast" seems to imply that, the brain tries to avoid having to actively think at all costs).
As an AI researcher, I've often been asked when I think we will have sufficient computational power for strong AI. I always answer, "About ten years ago." And I've been giving that answer for over ten years. I agree with the author that AI is a software problem rather than a hardware problem. But I think he misformulates the limitations. In AI, the issue isn't whether we can brute force a particular transformation (that is the ML approach), it's whether we can create a self-organizing system that recognizably approximates human cognition. Growing a redwood versus trying to build one, so to speak. Not an easier problem, but a different one whose limitations have not yet been defined.
Yep, statistically speaking "First they ignore you, then you die" is the correct version and describes App Store outside of top 50 apps.
Jay was a cohort of mine @ AOL for several years, a real nice guy. I didn't get the cause in the email.
How about triggering a buffer overflow? Assuming the Turing Complete substrate doesn't have infinite memory, maybe we can break out ;)
Maybe not meaningless; the common Westernized pronunciation does sound closer to Ghandi than Gandhi.
To those who wonder, Plastic SCM is a relatively unknown yet loved by those who know it SCM platform.

I moved all my private repos to it after fighting with a friend who kept insisting me to try it out, it took him 2 months and after I tried, I stayed. even if you love command line, know Git inside and out, I think you'll appreciate it, I am not affiliated, and have nothing to earn, but really think it's possibly best SCM in the world.

Why? it just works, and doesn't get in your way, and it works well with dummies like me, the merge tool is one of the best I've seen in the world, handles conflicts in the most accurate, worry free visual merge tools I've yet to work with.

I wonder if anyone have heard of it, tried it, and how come it's so unknown if it's that good?
> the idea of creating a new church that would take everything all the other religions said you could not do and made it OK.

detailed in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land

Also, Unitarian Universalism (a religion formed because Unitarianism and Universalism weren't broad enough!) is basically the most dilute religion. They have churches and services and community activities but no liturgy beyond a vague spirituality.
How to Run a Wicked Fast WordPress Instance
Real Time Trading in R (2009)
Message: any project would be cancelled if we knew ahead of time how hard its going to be.

Just started coding - it was a mechanical process to vet every pointer usage for the new address space limitations. That example could be done that way.
Rejected by Kickstarter? 'Roll your own' with Selfstarter instead
I like it. I especially appreciate that you have a free play mode. I think this could be good for road trips. Smart to have the free cards as a motivation to allow push notifications. The idea of user submitted cards is kinda neat too.
It might also be dependent on the angle at which one is viewing the LCD -- on my laptop at work, I often cannot distinguish some of the lighter shades, as I have the screen at a glare-reducing angle.
Found it and beautified is as much as I could. Really tough to read still: http://cl.ly/K74W
That's what space launch insurance is for I guess.
Shared: Bluehost

VPS: Linode

Other: AWS
Great, signed up for invite! Do you have support for Unity3D?
This reminds me of how my high school got an .edu domain (One of the parents bought the domain and donated it to the school pre-2001. A side-benefit of being in Silicon Valley I guess :P).
I've implemented Langton's Ant, another example of cellular automata, using canvas aswell http://alecraeside.com.au/projects/langtons-ant/
;-) I have an "OK" level of connections but I imagine something like this would be SF/SV focused and I have no real feet on the ground there. Thanks for the vote of confidence though!
I prefer zeros so I can :: them away.
Console Based Applications - Linux Links - The Linux Portal Site
Wow, I hope everyone reads the article before commenting. It’s still amazingly successful. There was a 95% chance the satellite would have made it if they tried, but they were obligated not to try if there were less than a 99% chance of success. (The reduced chance was due to the loss of one of the 9 engines.) And, of course, the primary mission to the space station was fully successful (the engine glitch notwithstanding).
Indeed I had lots of fun on my zone - and many big website do this too :-)

Try for ex
dig -t aaaa facebook.com
Here you go: http://jsfiddle.net/CSyUb/
You can use this in your web browser. Some really crappy local filters will also let you pass by using decimal/octal notation. Was a great trick in high school.
If the recursion spawns an average of more than one child universe per parent universe, then it would spawn an infinite number of universes, and maybe this is still the first run which, to the disappointment of our unknown benefactors, will produce no useful information.
I'm wondering what sorts of benefits (protections, legal boilerplate, etc.) that kickstarter provides that selfstarter does not. I imagine that there must be some benefits that having a company behind the platform brings to the table.
Shame. It doesn't sound like Orbcomm is too disappointed though. They were aware of the risks, and they did get to test some of the systems.
There are a number of reasons that we're taking these steps.

First, click to play for vulnerable plug-ins will make driveby exploits less likely to be successful.

Second, it gives users some protection while while they wait for a time to upgrade a plug-in that's more convenient to them.

Third, we've learned that if you simply take the plug-in away, users don't upgrade, they switch to one of the other browsers on their system which isn't taking their (potentially similarly vulnerable) plug-in away.

This is not the only answer, though. It's a step in an ongoing process to protect more users and one that I believe all browser vendors are converging on.
It is perfectly clear that this is a story of safety margines adhered to in an admirably strict fashion; not allowing short term thinking rule over long term; and certainly not allowing marketing rule over engineering. This is how you move mountains.
Something I don't see anyone else saying: the World Wide Web's primary "language", HTML, being so incredibly un-powerful and reliant on browsers for new features, is an intentional, FOUNDATIONAL design principle, called the Principle of Least Power: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html

I'm not saying I completely agree with it, but the rationale behind the principle, and its incredible success, are compelling arguments against what the article proposes, that are not addressed whatsoever.

Also, a nitpick I don't see anyone else making: the author doesn't seem to know the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web, which is acceptable for a mediocre Web developer, but pretty embarrassing for someone proposing a foundational change to the Web (one that, contrary to the provocative "new Internet" gospel in the first paragraph, doesn't affect the Internet Protocol Suite whatsoever).

(And of course, as pointed out by a plethora of other comments, the proposed foundational change is essentially the Java VM.)
Photographer Sues Apple Over the Use of Her Photo to Promote the Retina Display
Ideas are debt
There are many reasons why you'd want to allow an older version, such as there simply isn't a newer version available.

Just to give an example, Flash on ARM (non-Android) is old, however, most of the attacks won't work, due to the different architecture (that's not to say it's safe, just that most people aren't targeting non-android ARM devices yet.)

The odds of seeing any sort of update for it (I think, but don't quote me on it, it's version 10 or 11) are slim to none based on Google not releasing a version of Chrome for non android devices, nor does Adobe do the work of preparing Flash for these devices.

I'm not saying these machines are worry free, but I definitely don't concern myself near as much as for my amd64 boxes
Apparently 0xB16B00B5 made into some Microsoft HyperV code: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18922629

Blame? http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-driver-devel/msg15311.htm...
Unmasking The Biggest Troll on the Web
Just be careful you don't overwrite the stack canary and end up getting the whole universe terminated.
So, essentially, a company sends a satellite into space, tests it a lot, and then charges an insurance company $10 million because they expected it to fall into the atmosphere?

What insurance company lets a company take out a plan with that kind of risk?

Seems like NASA should've been getting insurance plans for the shuttle's External Tank all these years.
Im not a twitter user, so this may be just initial shock -- but while looking through the article's screenshots, i had flash backs of myspace.. not quite as bad, but a crowded over-personalized, over-whelming page.
> If I'm starting a flower business, is that a startup? No. I'm just starting a business. Selling flowers is a proven business model.

Amazon was never a startup then. Selling books is a proven business model.

Zappos was never a startup. Selling shoes is a proven business model.

Heroku is not a startup. Selling application hosting is a proven business model.

Github is not a startup. Code repositories have a long and storied history, and yes... are a proven business model.
They didn't expect it to fall. They were aware that their satellite was a secondary payload and would be abandoned if need be. I don't think anyone expected the Falcon 9 to lose an engine.
Actually, sounds like Orbcomm got a heck of a deal. They get insurance money and in addition to getting a few tests off on the prototype.
Personally, I would not create positions with those titles, but:

By creating the positions, you are sending a message to your employees that dissent is OK, or that thinking about culture is important. Further, you have an executive level person whose job it is to look for and remove barriers to dissent within your company, or to institute programs to make sure your employees are thinking about culture.
If the author is conversant in Haskell (or willing to become so), an interesting way to add value would be to support and document the various output formats, and add new output formats.

Pandoc's an awesome conversion tool, but because of its many supported output formats, some are more reliable than others. For example, it can actually output an HTML/JS-based slide deck - using any of four different JS slideshow libraries - but in my experience only one of them is actually usable, and it's not clear how to customise/style the output.

Of course fixing that as a developer is a simple matter of reading docs / code, but if this product is aiming to be "Pandoc for non-developers", that would be an interesting angle.
One of the biggest things that Kickstarter wanted to avoid was customers looking at projects and simply treating it like a store. So, they tried to prevent those types of projects from being created.

However, for some experienced people, that's exactly the experience they are trying to create, because it is what sells.
Hah. Good point. A couple days of free testing in space isn't a bad deal at all.
True, for the same reason that you don't see (m)any programs based on purely functional programming paradigms. Things with no side effects, no vulnerabilities, and no coupling to the outside world tend not to be very useful.
Google Street View adds 250,000 miles of roadways
Thanks for mentioning this. When I was reading this essay, my first thought was, "an essay that's seeking to define what a startup is that doesn't at least acknowledge Steve Blank's by-now-well-known definition just stumbled off the starting line."
From the article:

> "Orbcomm understood from the beginning that the orbit-raising maneuver was tentative," Nelson wrote. "They accepted that there was a high risk of their satellite remaining at the Dragon insertion orbit. SpaceX would not have agreed to fly their satellite otherwise, since this was not part of the core mission and there was a known, material risk of no altitude raise."

High risk, to me, says that there was a pretty good chance it was gonna fall.
Without knowledge of their premiums, it's difficult to judge what sort of deal it was.
I hate that my first reaction to this was a jaded groan. In actuality, whatever your profit motive, your stated goal is quite noble and valuable. It is always astonishing to me how litte researchers and academics care about the metrics of dissemination, as if printing something for their peers to read and having inset charts hidden away in the body of the text was all that's needed to make their work known. But not much effort is taken to improve communication and transparency because hey, academics are smart enough to figure it out themselves, right? Good luck with your work.
Right, I'm pretty sold on meditation having benefits, but this "practice resisting" mechanism seems like a flippant guess. Then there's the "willpower is a finite resource" studies argue that the opposite effect is more likely for people merely restraining themselves.
Twitter Open Sources Clutch
This is definitely valid and I don't think our approach scales. It was something a friend recommended and we tried it. HN has an upvote system for a reason.
How can flash have a serious vulnerability EVERY WEEK and it's over TWELVE years old?

That kinda blows my mind. I mean it's not an entire OS, just flash.
I am going to have to channel patio11 here - the Perfect Twitter Profile Page is one that supports your Twitter goals and is proven to do so with empirical testing.

What are your online goals? How do you measure them? Now how on earth does a twitter home page help that? If Facebook pages for major brands are one step removed then twitter home pages are a long down the road towards the shops.

If your tweet goes viral and most people then go to your twitter homepage, instead of that embedded URL, something is badly wrong

frankly your twitter homepage irrelevant - it's a 140 character broadcast service with no relevant interactivity on yr homepage - make it blank, put up a picture - if it is more than one hours work for the same designer who did your real home page then it's too long

Edit: curiously their own twitter page is my ideal - simple, clearly states who and what and links right into their main online presence - which fwiw is very funky.
I suppose that would work. Press a key on each breath, and use a script to alert after 108 keystrokes.
The Insurance probably cost $2-5million.
The beginning being as soon as they knew their satellite had been deposited well below the desired altitude. If the F9 engine hadn't failed, they wouldn't have needed to do an orbit raising maneuver at all and there would have been no risk of the satellite deorbiting.
I agree that "unique problem" probably isn't a good enough descriptor, but there's no such thing as something that's "legally" a startup or not. Now, there are regulations that define a "small business" based on number of employees or revenue, so you can say that you can be "legally" a small business. But startup is another animal. I personally prefer Steve Blank's definition.
To be sure, this is not a good outcome, but improper orbit insertion is a serious risk on every rocket launch, whether or not it's SpaceX and whether or not you're the primary payload. I'm glad to see that all parties involved realized this and Orbcomm planned accordingly. It would make little sense to accept the increased risk that a secondary payload status entails and to not be prepared for the consequences.

And SpaceX behaved just as any other launch vehicle provider would in that situation. They gave their best effort to the secondary payload, but in the end, sacrificed it in order to achieve their primary mission.
F.T.C. Staff Prepares Antitrust Case Against Google
Since you cannot predict the future, supporting or contradicting ideas/projects blindly is very dangerous.

In spite of the above, I think there's value to someone who opposes new ideas/projects, but only in a very directed and specific way: to stay focused.

I've seen many startups get really distracted with side projects and non important stuff, this is incredibly dangerous to the company, so having some sort of system to minimize distractions could be something very valuable.
Note to self: Don't start a space mission insurance company.
What if the winning hackers win at two of your events, and are funded for two different companies but aren't interested in the problem after the weekend - except for the running around money.

Is the money in the form of 'a gift which could be used to run a company for a couple of months'?

Who would collect the money, just one of them in their bank account?

Who monitors the teams afterwards - or is that just up to the your sponsor/the investor?

Basically, I like the idea - but I'd be tempted to use it to allow me space to concentrate on my primary software idea more, rather than a 3 day event health hackathon solution. As an investor, I'd be worried that I'd be 'herding cats' getting three teams of three random people (for example) to continue a project they don't genuinely care about and eventually have just lost that money.

How do you plan to address these concerns?
Yeah, but Howell's ideas are pretty much orthogonal to the web. A program that allows a number of virtual machines to cooperate in providing an interface to the user isn't an uninteresting idea, but it solves almost none of the problems the web solves (things like, standards for transmitting, displaying, and interacting with hypermedia).
Counter-example: the blackberry in 2002.
That's pretty clearly a little doublespeak going on. Of course it's shitty that the secondary mission didn't happen, but neither Orbcomm nor SpaceX wants this to go down in the press as a failure, so the party line is "Well, it was a big risk, and we accepted it." There's not much else Orbcomm could say unless they wanted to lambaste SpaceX as a scapegoat, which they don't want to do because of an ongoing relationship.
The demographic here is "people will who answer questions like this from Paul Graham". It's not exactly a representative sample. We don't even know its operator vs. investor makeup. Some of the people in the sample don't even live in the Valley. But the headline...

I flagged it after 'ssclafani did, hoping it might just vanish (I've since unflagged it), but for what it's worth: I don't so much think it's radically inappropriate for HN (though it sets a disquieting precedent, because the world is full of cohorts that someone can claim are interesting to HN), just that it's not particularly valuable, and a little transparent.

(For whatever it's worth, I'm an Obama supporter).
If the mission had succeeded, they would've been able to test it a little longer and then received 0 money back. Early test termination yields $10 mil.

Either way they're still paying the premiums. I have a feeling, though, that the premiums will be going up after this.
Nice article.

"... a stuffed giraffe that squirted whipped cream on the audience."

Washington Senator Slade Gorton telling him to pipe down for mimicking Mrs. Baker's Southern accent in a Senate hearing. I would _love_ to see some video of that. C-SPAN archives?
Amazing...
I'm old enough (sigh) to remember reading about Life in a Martin Gardner column 40 years ago and playing it on a piece of graph paper.
I've just thought today that there should be some game server software / framework for MMOG that allows to just focus on your instead of some server backend. Seems as if someone's already done that :)